Features
Part of What business credit scores cannot tell you
Four products hiding under one business credit scores service
Business credit scores services sit on one shelf and do four different jobs. How to tell them apart, what to ask before paying, and how to test one first.
Search for a service around business credit scores and you get one shelf holding four unrelated products. They are priced similarly, marketed identically, and do completely different things.
Sorting them is most of the work. Once you know which of the four you are looking at, the question of whether it is worth paying for usually answers itself.
What to take away
- Ask one question firstdoes this vendor touch the data, or only show it to me? Everything else follows from the answer.
- No vendor can promise a number, because no vendor outside the bureau runs the model that produces it.
- An offer to attach your business to a stranger's account is an offer to mislead a lender. That is not a service tier, it is the exit.
Four products, one shelf
What you are buying
- Access reseller
- A copy of a file the bureau will also sell you directly
- Monitoring
- Alerts when something on a file changes
- Correction help
- Labor to chase a wrong entry through a bureau's own process
- "Improvement"
- A claim about the number itself
Where it goes wrong
- Access reseller
- Markup, a stale copy, and a login that is not yours
- Monitoring
- Frequency you cannot act on, and coverage of fewer bureaus than you assumed
- Correction help
- Charging for a process you can run yourself, or promising an outcome nobody controls
- "Improvement"
- Everything
The first three can be honest work. Whether they are worth paying for depends on
Four Products, One Shelf
Access reseller
- What it is
- File copy reseller
- What you buy
- Bureau file copy
- Where it fails
- Markup, stale copy
- Honest work?
- Sometimes
Monitoring
- What it is
- Change alerts
- What you buy
- Alerts on changes
- Where it fails
- Unusable frequency
- Honest work?
- Sometimes
Correction help
- What it is
- Chase wrong entries
- What you buy
- Labor inside process
- Where it fails
- Promised outcome
- Honest work?
- Sometimes
"Improvement"
- What it is
- Claim about number
- What you buy
- A claim
- Where it fails
- Everything
- Honest work?
- No
The question that sorts them
Does the vendor put data into your file, take data out of it, or only display
Sort the Vendor by Data Flow
Does the vendor put data in, take data out, or only display?
Only displays -> convenience; compare bureau prices
Corrects entries -> labor inside bureau process; promise work not result
it?
A vendor that only displays is selling convenience. Compare its price against going to each bureau directly, which you can always do, and against the effort of doing so.
A vendor that says it will correct something is selling labor inside a process the bureau owns. Reasonable, as long as the promise is about the work rather than the result.
A vendor that says it will put something into your file needs a closer look. Legitimately, it means enrolling you with a creditor who reports.
Illegitimately, it means paying to appear on somebody else's aged account so a lender reads a history you do not have.
That is misrepresentation to the lender whatever the invoice says, and the signature on the application is yours, not the vendor's.
What to ask before paying
- Which bureaus does this cover, by name, and which does it not?
- Is the data pulled live, or is it a copy from an earlier date?
- Whose account is it? If I cancel, do I keep access to my own records?
- What exactly is the deliverable, stated as work rather than as an outcome?
- What is the term, how does it renew, and how is it canceled?
- Does anything here authorize the vendor to act in my name, and how far?
Get the answers in writing. A vendor comfortable putting its scope in an email
Ask Before Paying
- Which bureaus covered, by name?
- Live data or earlier copy?
- Whose account, and access after cancel?
- Deliverable stated as work, not outcome?
- Term, renewal, and cancellation?
- Authorized to act in my name, how far?
Testing before committing
If there is a trial, do not browse it. Give it one real job you actually need
Test the Trial Properly
- Give it one real job you need done
- Check it works end to end
- Show every line on one bureau's file
- Name which accounts appear and which do not
- Export what you see into something you keep
- Note what happens at trial end
done, and see whether it does that job end to end.
Show every line on one bureau's file and tell me which of my accounts appear and which do not. Export what I am looking at into something I can keep.
A product that shows a headline number quickly but cannot answer the second question is built for reassurance, not work. A file that shows every line is the same view a business credit scores review works from, in the same order.
Note what the trial does at its end, before you start it, not afterwards.
Where these services genuinely help
When your files are spread across bureaus and you have no time, an aggregator saves real effort. When an entry is wrong and the correction is slow, paying someone to chase it can beat doing it yourself between other work.
When you extend terms to customers, a service that watches counterparties matters more than one that watches you. That is a different purchase from the one most of these pages are selling.
What none of them do is make a lender say yes. That decision is made using policy the vendor cannot see, on top of an input the vendor did not build. See how the bureaus differ for why even the input is not one thing.
The vocabulary these products borrow comes from the consumer side, where it is explained plainly and for free. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sets out what a credit score is, and the Federal Trade Commission covers the same ground in fewer words under understanding your credit. Read either before paying anybody to explain a number to you.
Common questions
Is the bureau's own product better than a reseller's?
It is at least the actual file, from the company that holds it, with a correction route attached. Whether it is better value depends on how many bureaus you need and how often, which is the same calculation behind monitoring.
A vendor promises a specific improvement. Is that ever legitimate?
Not as stated. Nobody outside the bureau runs the model. A promise about a number is either a misunderstanding of what they are selling or a claim they know they cannot keep. It sits alongside the other misreadings worth avoiding.
Do I need any of this at the beginning?
Look at what already exists first, directly and at each bureau. Buying a view of a file you have never read is the most common wasted purchase in this whole subject.
